Political Pressure td-135

by Warren Murphy

  "He's the MAEBE nominee for president, if you can believe that."

  Remo looked at Chiun questioningly. Chiun shook his head. "I cannot explain this. I find everything about this nation's process of leader-choosing to be baffling."

  "Here's the really bizarre part," Bang said. "He just might do it."

  "No way," Remo said, watching the tall, scrawny man in the nerd glasses speak to the crowd.

  "Yes way." Bang had stopped laughing. "I know shit about politics but I know popular opinion, and this MAEBE bunch has got a rocket engine strapped to it in the popularity poles. If they keep climbing like they have been, and if they can hold on to a good chunk of it, then that fuck Flicker'll do what Ross Perot only dreamed of."

  Remo briefly considered what it would be like to have the skinny PR guy calling CURE's shots. "Not good," he announced.

  "Not good at all," Bang agreed, and now his flabby face was a bulldog frown. "They're so right wing they'll outlaw half the lifestyles in San Francisco. No ifs, ands or maybes."

  29

  "I believe now would be an excellent time to call Emperor Smith," Chiun said.

  "First things first." The tires squealed and Remo steered the rental car around a knot of fist-shaking pedestrians, ignoring them and putting his foot down as far as it would go.

  "This is unwise."

  "Everything I do is unwise, isn't it?" Remo felt the sinking of his entrails as the car shot over a rise and momentarily defeated gravity. The long street went straight downhill, with a number of rises designed to slow traffic that otherwise would have had a three-mile mountainside slide into the sea.

  "When I said unwise I was being kind," Chiun insisted as they roared into the next rise.

  "You? Kind?" They went over. "Never!"

  The tires never left the pavement but the car was almost weightless for a few seconds, then descended heavily and the underside hit with a brief crunch.

  "You'll kill the both of us!"

  "What would the world be like without you?"

  "Why are we in such a hurry? The killers will still be there when we get there."

  "I don't want to take any chances!"

  "If this meets your definition of 'not taking chances'—"

  They went up again. They came down again.

  "Pieces of the car are being left behind," Chiun shouted over the suddenly loud engine noise.

  "They can't be too important. It's still going," Remo insisted.

  "Have you considered they might be important if and when you decide to stop?"

  Chiun was a master of balance, among other things, and he adjusted his body perfectly as the car dipped, roared and soared. Then it came down, and down, and kissed the pavement with a spray of sparks and a ripping of plastic body parts.

  "I had daylight under them wheels that time, Little Father!"

  "You're a lunatic!"

  "You're a grouch. And you're supposed to be watching the street numbers. What are we at?"

  "We're in the thirty-eight hundreds."

  The tires squeaked and kept squeaking for ten seconds. The rental car, a three-week-old Saturn that had no future except to provide parts to other Saturns, skidded and vibrated and shuddered to an ugly stop.

  Remo found himself alone in the front seat. He jumped out and discovered Chiun waiting twenty paces behind him.

  "I had no desire to be a part of your spectacular finale."

  "There's Griffin's headquarters," Remo said, jogging by Chiun fast. "Come on."

  They heard the choked sound, not a scream, more like a sob that other ears would not have heard. It came from behind the glass of the storefront that had the legend Bruce Griffin, California State Representative.

  Remo stopped. Chiun was surprised. Not that it made him falter as he, too, came to an immediate halt. He simply didn't understand what Remo was doing.

  "Little Father, nobody dies. Got it? Nobody dies."

  Chiun didn't get a chance to respond before Remo was bolting for the door and twisting off the door latch.

  The metal knob made a short protest, but Remo didn't care. He slipped inside, finding himself in an empty reception area illuminated only by the light through the window. An eight-foot portable office wall blocked off the rest of the office. The sobbing came from behind it, as did the alarmed voices of people who wondered about the sound of the lock ripping apart. Remo went up and over the wall as if it were waist high and landed silently in the midst of the killing floor.

  The sobbing sound came out of the woman on the floor, but it was the last sound she was ever to make. Her gaze froze, surprised—Remo Williams's arrival was the last thing she would ever see. A face-up corpse sprawled beside her had once been a middle-aged man, and nearby was a police officer, sprawled on his face on the desk. Their throats had been cut.

  "Messy," Remo commented to the trio prepared to spring on the intruder who would come in around the room divider. They all turned fast, fumbling into one another.

  "Messy," Remo told the one who still wore his white mask. The others had removed the masks but still wore the now-familiar blacksuits and white gloves.

  The man triggered the Uzi, but by the time the brain command reached his fingers the Uzi had gone missing. He relocated it as the hand grip inserted in his mouth, and the stock and barrel were bent around his head, tight.

  The gunner's skull was wearing a new kind of hood, but it was steel and it was one size smaller than his head and part of it was gagging him. He clawed at the curled Uzi, then felt himself shoved. He slammed into the wall and crumpled, semiconscious.

  Remo snatched the guns out of the hands of the other pair and shoved one man fast enough to spin him to the floor, which kept him occupied while Remo created handcuffs for his partner. The Uzi stock bent easily enough around the gunner's wrists, and the gunner stared at the results as his partner was lifted from the floor and given similar treatment.

  Chiun could have been a colorful ghost, for he seemed to glide rather than run, and the long skirts of his kimono hid most of his knobby legs. To the pair of blacksuited, white-hooded killers he came out of nowhere to appear in the narrow alley behind the politician's headquarters.

  "Stop right there, Grandpa." Two machine guns pointed at his stomach.

  "I am sorry, gentlemen."

  "Sorry for what?"

  "That I cannot kill you right away. You see, there is a pale piece of a pig's ear who has become quite bossy of late. If I kill you now, I will be forced to endure his complaints for days."

  The gunners snorted through their white masks. "A batty old chink."

  Chiun smiled. "Come with me, please."

  He floated into their midst like a swan floating on the surface of a still pond, but came so fast they didn't have time to squeeze their triggers. The weapons lifted out of the gunners' hands and slid into the hands of the old man as if he had the assistance of invisible spirits. A moment later the four pieces of the two Uzis dropped to the pavement, and the gunners became prisoners of the old Asian man in the most embarrassing manner possible.

  He was holding on to their earlobes, though the tiny little man had to reach above his head to grasp them. The gunners felt hundreds of muscles clench in a head-to- toe spasm of agony.

  "Please accompany me inside so that you may meet the pale piece of a pig's ear about which I was telling you."

  The gunners felt as if they were in a state of living rigor mortis, but the pressure on their earlobes decreased, just slightly, and they were able to walk where the little man led them. He guided them to the narrow rear doorway to the politician's office, which stood open. The little man went through, but the gunners went into the brick wall on either side of the door.

  "You are being uncooperative," Chiun admonished the two. "I may have to kill you after all."

  The gunners found themselves maneuvered through the door, walking sideways. The pain emanating from the earlobes was so mind-boggling they didn't even notice the shattered facial bones.

&nbs
p; The five thugs were lined up on the floor, where they could stare at their handiwork. The man was the state representative Griffin. The woman was his assistant. The cop was just some cop who happened to get nosy at the wrong time.

  "I want answers, I want them now and I want no dicking around. Who's your boss?"

  There was stony-faced silence from the killers.

  Remo moved from one man to another. He twisted the Uzis a little tighter, and he pinched the wrists of the paralyzed pair from the alley.

  The thrashing and screaming went on and on, and for the five killers their lives could be divided into two halves: the time before the pain and the time of pain.

  "Raise your hand if you want me to make it stop," Remo called.

  There were no words in all the screaming and shouting, and the only one of them physically capable of raising his hand was the one with the Uzi skull clamp. He managed to stop trying to pry the thing off long enough to shove his hand in the air.

  "Okay," Remo said, and he loosened the Uzi just enough. The others also received a temporary reprieve. "Who's the leader of this band of idiots?"

  "General Kough. Him in the middle."

  "Okay, Kough, I'll ask you. Who do you take your orders from?"

  "I never knew his real name," gasped the one named Kough.

  "This is why you had me waste time not killing them? So you could ask them questions they cannot answer?" Chiun stood behind the line-up, irritated.

  "You never know. Kough was never told the man's name, but that doesn't mean he can't make an intelligent guess. What about it, Kough? Ever have a hint about who your boss was?"

  "No."

  "Sure?"

  General Kough wasn't exactly general material by most Army standards. He was whining. "Maybe!"

  "Ah," Remo said. "Maybe?"

  "Orville Flicker," the general admitted. "I heard his name a couple of times when I was on the phone with him, and once, when we met in person, his beard fell off. I got a good look at his face and I thought I recognized him. And he said we were a part of the great new movement in American politics. Then, when I saw him on TV today, I knew it was the same guy."

  Remo grinned at Chiun. "See, Little Father? Now we're getting somewhere."

  "So get on with it."

  "Anything else you'd like to add?" Remo asked the general.

  "I know a target—not one of our targets but another one. A big one."

  "Let's hear it."

  "I want a guarantee. I don't get killed."

  Chiun frowned at the idea.

  "We're assassins, pal. You want to make us look bad?"

  "That's the deal—take it or leave it."

  30

  "I took the deal," Remo reported.

  "Did you honor it?" Mark Howard asked hesitantly.

  "Course. He'll live."

  "Meaning?"

  "Accident. He'll be a deaf-and-dumb quadriplegic. But he'll live. Better than he gave the senator and his assistant and some poor cop who happened to be in the neighborhood." A moment later Remo added, "Hello?"

  "I'm still here," Mark said, feeling slightly queasy. He was no stranger to violence, but still, the ease with which the CURE enforcement arm did its job could be disturbing. "Give me the list of targets he provided before his accident."

  There was rustle of the phone and a female voice in the background said something in a stilted voice like a badly acted hussy from a 1950s movie. "Sorry. Stewardess," Remo said. "Here's the list."

  Mark Howard tapped out the names provided by Remo, and was disconcerted at the lack of activity on the screen. The Folcroft Four, the mainframes in the basement that handled the vast data-crunching activities for CURE, should have automatically sought out all available information on the names. It was a function they performed as a matter of course for any intelligence entered by Howard or Smith. Full profiles of the first names should have been assembling in background windows even as Howard was finishing entering the last of them.

  Then he realized that the names were some of the names he had expected to see on the list, but so badly mangled, mispronounced and transposed that the ID routine wasn't matching them to their actual names. Howard sighed and rekeyed the names he recognized. Gerhard Slippers became Gerald Cypress, the mayor of one of the wealthiest coastal cities between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Lizette Gambino became Elizabeth Gamby, a high-profile judge in the Federal Circuit Court, based in Sacramento. Some of the others fell in place, but a couple of the names would take research to decipher. "Remo, I wish you would be more careful when gathering intelligence," Mark Howard said.

  "Hi, Smitty."

  "That was me talking. Mark."

  "Are you the one with circulation or without? I can't keep you two straight anymore."

  "This Dick Lard. Is there any chance the name was actually Richard Ladd?" Howard asked.

  "Uh, maybe," Remo said uncertainly.

  "Yes," said the high-pitched voice of Master Chiun in the background. Howard could never quite get used to the fact that whatever he said on the phone to either of them would be heard by the other if he was within a city block.

  "Maybe I'll have Master Chiun begin reporting on your intelligence gathering," Howard sniped.

  "I am not a clerk!" Chiun snapped.

  "Hey, he's the one who makes me take down all my notes in Hangul characters anyway," Remo said. "I'm supposed to be learning better writing skills and English doesn't count."

  "It would be extremely helpful if you would use English on those rare occasions that you gather information in the field," Howard said irritably.

  "All right, Smitty, don't have a cow. Oh, sorry. It's Smitty the Poorer I'm talking to, isn't it?"

  The toughest part of his job, Mark Howard decided for the umpteenth time, was staying on the mission track when dealing with Remo. And Chiun, for that matter. If he ever left CURE, he would be prepared to teach eight-graders.

  The name Humbert Coleslaw, the last one on the list, clicked in Mark's head. "Herbert Whiteslaw."

  "Remo Williams, actually."

  "I'll call you back."

  Mark Howard clicked off the connection to the aircraft phone and began frantically calling up everything he had on Senator Herbert Whiteslaw, D-CA.

  A senator from California was important enough a character, but Whiteslaw seemed an unlikely target for MAEBE. He wasn't up for reelection. There was no MAEBE candidate vying for his post. If MAEBE murdered him, the governor of the state would appoint a successor to fill his term and it wasn't too likely the successor would be from MAEBE.

  But something was bothering Mark Howard about the name. It wasn't some psychic radio waves from space aliens, either. Some connection was there, something he couldn't quite get.

  Then he got it.

  "That was the greatest moment of my life!" Ed Kriidelfisk cried happily. "Those people loved us!"

  "They did," Orville Flicker agreed, in the best of spirits. "We're going to make it, Ed. We're going to the top."

  "Yes, sir! Nothing is going to stop us now. Man, what a great day!"

  "It's only going to get better."

  They sipped their champagne and rode in silence, basking in the glow of the press event. Buoyed by spiraling popularity, the MAEBE nomination for President had been greeted with wild applause. Even Ed Kriidelfisk, when he was introduced as man running for vice president alongside Flicker, was given a warm ovation, even if nobody knew who he was.

  Flicker had made sure that everybody knew who Kriidelfisk was before the press conference was over, listing Kriidelfisk's long list of achievements and emphasizing his dedication to the cause of what was right and good. Kriidelfisk came across as a living saint.

  "Where we headed?" Kriidelfisk asked as Kohd, Flicker's emotionless assistant, steered the long limousine off the highway and onto a side road.

  "Into the pages of history." Flicker smiled and toasted Kriidelfisk, who wasn't sure what that meant and didn't really care. He'd go wherever Flicker wanted to
take him.

  When the car stopped in the middle of nowhere and the guns commenced firing, Ed Kriidelfisk had only a moment to realize that he had chosen the wrong set of coattails to ride upon.

  "That's what you get, you blackmailing bastard," Flicker told Ed just before the cops arrived. Ed was beyond hearing.

  Kohd held a sliver of glass and examined Flicker's face. "Where would you like it?"

  Flicker traced a line across his jaw, where the scar wouldn't be visible all the time, wouldn't be repulsive, but where it could be brought into view with a proud lift of his head.

  Kohd nodded and inserted the glass.

  Dr. Harold W. Smith was taking a walk.

  Every fiber in his being told him it was somehow wrong to be doing this thing, but his assistant, and his secretary, had ganged up on him, berated him, browbeat him and nagged him. Worse, they had pummeled him with logic.

  "You need exercise," Mark Howard said.

  "A walk at lunchtime does me a world of good," Mrs. Mikulka chimed in.

  "You'll work better," Howard insisted.

  Smith tried to downplay the advantages, but Howard fired back with encyclopedic research showing the link between exercise and improved mental performance.

  "The last thing I have time to do in the middle of a crisis is go play eighteen holes," Smith had declared, hoping that would be the end of it and knowing it would not.

  "Who said anything about playing golf?" Mark said. "You just need to walk."

  "We have lovely grounds," Mrs. Mikulka said with a smile.

  Smith wanted to reply that he had, in fact, seen the grounds of Folcroft a time or two in his several decades as director of the sanitarium. He had only one argument left to make, and, with the same gentle smile, Mrs. Mikulka shot that one down, too, before he even uttered it. "Besides, there's nothing that can happen that Mark can't handle while you're out."

  Skillfully done, Smith thought. His secretary had challenged Smith to deny Mark's competency, which he could not do.

  So Dr. Smith went for a walk, and he went the next day, and every day for a week.